Inter-cultural differences in response to a computer-based anti-bullying intervention

Background and purpose: Many holistic anti-bullying interventions have been attempted, with mixed success, while little work has been done to promote a 'self-help' approach to victimisation. The rise of the ICT curriculum and computer support in schools now allows for approaches that benefit from technology to be implemented. This study evaluates the cross-cultural effects of a computer-based anti-bullying intervention on primary school-aged children's knowledge about bullying and relevant coping strategies. Programme description: FearNot! is an interactive computer-based virtual learning environment designed for use as an anti-bullying intervention. It includes interactive virtual agents who assume the most common participant roles found in episodes of bullying. FearNot! was used by children over three consecutive weeks to allow its effectiveness to be evaluated in a longitudinal in situ programme. Sample: Two comparable samples were drawn from the UK and Germany. In the UK, 651 participants (aged 8-11) were recruited from primary schools in Hertfordshire, Coventry and Warwickshire, whereas the 535 German participants (aged 7-10) were sourced from Grundschulen in the Bayern and Hessen regions. Because of lack of parental consent, late joiners and absences/missing responses, data from 908 participants (UK 493; Germany 415) were analysed. Design and methods: A quasi-experimental, pre/post-tests control group design employed pre-published and bespoke questionnaires to collect data. Descriptive and inferential analyses were conducted. Results: UK students possessed higher coping strategy knowledge scores than German participants, but German children's scores improved over time and as a result of the FearNot! intervention. Conclusions: Overall, while not effective at increasing children's coping strategy knowledge in this study, the FearNot! intervention could prove a useful classroom tool to approach the issue of bullying as part of a wider initiative. Cultural differences at baseline and reactions to the intervention are discussed

But that was in another country: agents and intercultural empathy

This paper discusses the development of a believable agent-based educational application designed to develop inter-cultural empathy for 13-14 year old students. It considers relevant work in cultural taxonomy and adaptation to other cultures as well as work showing that users are sensitive to the perceived culture of believable interactive characters. It discusses how an existing affective agent architecture was developed to model culturally- specific agent behaviour. Finally, it considers the role of interaction modalities in supporting an empathic engagement with culturally-specific characters

Measurement of the effects of school psychological services: a scoping review

School psychologists are asked to systematically evaluate the effects of their work to ensure quality standards. Given the different types of methods applied to different users of school psychology measuring the effects of school psychological services is a complex task. Thus, the focus of our scoping review was to systematically investigate the state of past research on the measurement of the effects of school psychological services published between 1998 and 2018 in eight major school psychological journals. Of the 5,048 peer-reviewed articles published within this period, 623 were coded by two independent raters as explicitly refering to school psychology or counseling in the school context in their titles or abstracts. However, only 22 included definitions of effects of school psychological services or described outcomes used to evaluate school psychological services based on full text screening. These findings revealed that measurement of the effects of school psychological services has not been a focus of research despite its' relevance in guidelines of school psychological practice

Coping with stress in childhood and adolescence: A rapid systematic review of evaluation instruments

This project aims to complete a rapid systematic review of evaluation instruments measuring stress coping in children and adolescent

Effectiveness of Safe Place: a School-Based Resilience Program for Children and Young Adolescents:

In this project we aim to evaluate the effectiveness of Safe Place, a school-based resilience and stress coping program for children and young adolescents

E-motional learning in primary schools: FearNot! an anti-bullying intervention based on virtual role-play with intelligent synthetic characters

Addressing the problems of bullying in schools, this paper presents a novel and highly innovative pedagogical approach building on the immersive power of virtual role-play. Educational role-play is widely accepted as a powerful instrument to change attitudes and behaviour, but faces some difficulties and disadvantages when applied to sensitive social issues in the classroom. This paper shows how the FearNot! software application, developed within the scope of the EU-funded project eCIRCUS (Education through Characters with emotional-Intelligence and Role-playing Capabilities that Understand Social interaction) uses virtual role-play and autonomous agents to provide children aged 8 to 11 with the opportunity to visit a virtual school environment populated by 3D animated synthetic characters that engage in bullying episodes. The characters ’ actions and the storyline are created as improvised dramas by use of emergent narrative, resulting in unscripted and highly believable interaction experiences for the user. While the students are spectators to the bullying episodes that unfold among the FearNot! characters, the victimised character starts a conversation with the student in between the episodes, describing their experiences with bullying and how they feel as a result to it, and asking the student for advice. The aim of this approach and particularly of this interaction sequence in between the virtual bullyin